Quest Quencher

For this year’s Tojam we finally did what we said we’d never do, that is to create an RPG from scratch in two days. Somehow, we pulled it off… well mostly.

The Game,

Turn-based dungeon crawler influenced by traditional tabletop style gameplay. The Player controls three heroic characters, The Gladiator, The Elementalist and The Jinxer. Each character comes with their own set of abilities and provides unique roles for the group. Original intent was to allow multiplayer co-op mode or a VS mode where one player acts as the dungeon master controlling all the monsters, while the additional player(s) control the hero characters. This feature was out of scope for the Jam though. Levels were built from a modular tile-set which could later be used for dynamic creation. We used Unity for the game’s engine.

Day One,

I spent most of day one finalizing any design mechanics, creating shaders in Unity, and coming up with a layout for the modular art assets. Rhys began with our teams logo design, we wanted to get some t-shirts printed this year. Though we should have probably had this done prior to the Jam as it’s not directly related to the development and took up some of his time. After the logo, Rhys delivered some concept art and portraits for the UI. Phil K. Started tackling UI graphics, the programmers started to work their magic making everything happen.

Day Two,

The only day where we have the full day to work on the game, this is the day where most the assets have to be done. I started work on the modules for the levels, modeling then texturing them. Once those were done, I switched into design mode and began creating the level layout. Rhys got us a lot more of the unit portraits and concept art, while his wife graced us with some audio for background music. Programmers began to get all the core mechanics working and were ready to begin art asset integration.

Day Three,

The most important day of the Jam, when everything comes together. A lot of this day is spent with programmers yelling at you for being too slow delivering assets or for them not being delivered to specifications. After having worked with Fraser on many projects I triple check my work, but still he managed to find a problem with the module orientation, luckily it was solved quickly. My art creation was pretty much done for the Jam as I switched back in to design mode to create the level and set up the combat encounters. Rhys got us a few more portraits for the units, but unfortunately due to a tablet cable breaking, the Jinxer’s portrait never got finished. Phil K. having baby agro caused delays with the UI. I had to come up with a last minute UI design so Phil C. could set it up in engine. Fraser integrated all the art assets, coached everyone through troubleshooting issues and continued work on the gameplay.

End Result

Day 3 came to a close, the final hours spent making sure the bare minimum was present and that hopefully everything worked. We compiled the game and hooray, it ran! It has its bugs of course, on both the programming and art side. The lighting is all over the place, as I ran out of time to fix the lightmaps. The characters and units are just cubes with their appropriate portraits (except the ones that didn’t get done.) This is less a bug though, as it was a choice. Creating 3d models for the characters and npc’s with our limited team size and time was just not possible. The health and action point bars weren’t reporting accurate values, only 100% or 0, that made things a bit more challenging when playing. Some of the abilities didn’t work, or didn’t work as intended, but for the most part it came together and was playable. I made it through a few encounters before my gladiator was killed. I didn’t see it coming due to the health bug mentioned previously, though I knew things were probably bad when he was surrounded by a wraith and 4 skeletons!

Much fun was had through development, and we’re proud of what we accomplished in the set time window. We’ll probably polish it up a little, then I’ll see if I can post a link to download it here…

…in case anyone needs to slake their thirst for adventure!

The future for Quest Quencher still remains to be decided. Here’s a few gameplay screens. Apologies for them being a bit blurry, I wasn’t running the game at native resolution when I took them. These are also from the morning after, so the health bars and DMG reporting was fixed.